


Entries and Explanations

by darkwizart



Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Animated (2007)
Genre: Contest Entry, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:40:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21616975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkwizart/pseuds/darkwizart
Summary: Megatron is imprisoned. The day is won. And yet some completely unrelated and unimportant civilians wonder if there's something going on that High Command doesn't want to acknowledge...[Info] A few months ago a TFA server I'm in ran a little contest. Make something - anything - thematically related to a set story (that revolved around the 'Cons trying to break out their glorious leader unnoticed.) I chose to have a few fan characters of mine notice things, theorize, talk, maybe panic a little...Sadly the contest was stopped due to a lack of participants, but here's the two tiny snippets I wrote! (If anything seems weird, English isn't my first language...and yeah, I couldn't think of a better title.)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 5





	1. Surveillance

**Author's Note:**

> The situation I wrote this chapter around: Soundwave sends Frenzy through the walls of Trypticon Prison, to scout for the location of Megatron's cell.  
> Soundwave being Soundwave, he's hacked into quite a few things to get there, and I was like, "Hey, what if one of the security people notices something's weird with the surveillance system?"  
> (I made the layout of the prison up on the spot. I don't know if there's any official map of it and it's surroundings...)

It wasn't quite the usual night for Cetax. Ferrying low-priority supplies to and from the guards at Trypticon’s gates was normally quite the boring job, but today a seemingly endless chain of accidents had forced the hulking submarine-bot to take a longer route to his destination. Not that carrying a fresh load of stasis cuffs wasn’t enough work, no, he was also nearly an hour late! Grumbling, he approached the outmost gate and stood still in front of the scanner affixed to the guardhouse. After five kliks, he hear an affirming beep and a ping reached his comm-line: “C’mon in. Be quick about it.”  
Stepping through the gate, Cetax gave a curt nod to the two Autotroopers guarding it and smiled at the security-mech approaching him from the second gate. “Evening, Cloudcutter! Got the shipment.”  
Cloudcutter didn’t answer, he just motioned towards the prison. “Inside. Now.” From up close, Cetax could see his tense expression and wondered just what as going on with his guard friend. Nontheless, he followed the black car-alt inside, through the three gates and into the prison, where they went into a security station after being critically surveyed by multiple minicons. Cloudcutter gestured towards the spare supply crates stacked in the corner. Cetax shot him a look. “No more room in the storage areas? How many detainment devices did High Command even order?” “Don’t ask me,” muttered Cloudcutter before sitting down and sighing loudly into his hands. “Just put ‘em there for the time being. Sen-- the acting Magnus is on edge. He’s been tight on security for the last few months, but that’s nothing compared to now.”  
“Sentinel is a paranoiac lugnut, if you care for my opinion”, Cetax snorted as he unloaded the crates of stasis cuffs from his subspace and tried his best to balance them on the dangerously wobbly stack in the corner.  
“That’s just it, Cetax”, Cloudcutter continued, now staring at the wall of security camera screens. “That’s just it! Last week I’d have agreed with you but -- to be quite honest, either he’s right or the constant changing orders and demands of total vigilance are frying my synapses.”  
Alarmed, Cetax made his way to his friend. “Right? Clouds -- not that I don’t get the tightened security, the ‘cons could try and break out the old slagmaker any second, but you, endorsing Sentinel’s alarmist hogwash?”  
“Worse than right,” Cloudcutter corrected himself and turned to Cetax. “I know you can keep a secret, and that’s the only reason I’ll tell you this.” Then, he sent an encrypted ping to Cetax, whose face gradually fell as he decoded it and processed the contents.

[We’ve been getting encrypted probing signals into the sky spy cams for months now - usually that’d be Autobot Command snooping around, we’re under order to not act on that, but --don’t laugh!-- I had a bad feeling about those. The frequency of incoming pings was unusual too, increasing massively last week. But that’s just when we got orders to double down on our security protocols. Again. The minicons noticed nothing unusual, which is why we assumed...oh, well. You know how it is. No doubt gets out.]

[Hate to say it, but that makes sense, Clouds. With all the things Sentinel imposed on us...curfew, closing down entire areas...I’d expect nothing less than High Command not being able to keep their fingers away from the security feeds of the whole planet.]

Cloudcutter looked conflicted as he answered.

[Well, it’s back to normal now.]

“Wouldn’t that be good thing?”, Cetax asked out loud, puzzled.

[ARE Y-- are you out of your mind?!], Cloudcutter shot back. [We get supposedly harmless signals interfering with the camera data transfer of the prison that holds Megatron! First it’s nothing out of the ordinary, then they increase just as orders to “keep an eye open for suspicious activity” arrive, and then, right after orders to double down again yesterday, suddenly -- nothing! All back to normal!]

The security-mech sank into his chair, as if to melt into the dark of the room, and locked eyes with his friend.

“I saw something”, he confessed, out loud. “Just a few hours ago - I swear, one of the sky-spies caught a shadow outside the first gate. Only a small flicker of a wing in the edge of the screen.” He turned towards the cameras again, almost as if speaking to himself. “I alerted everyone, of course. Had every corner checked, every camera feed rewound and rewound, every field scanner looked at. Nothing. Head of Security’s sent out troopers, interrogating every single civilian seen in a one-mile radius. Hell, we’re in the process of interrogating the guards.”

“And you got nothing?”

“Not a glimpse. No tampering with the cameras, either. Inquiries about the probing signals are going to Intelligence, and now…”

“Now you sit and wait, locked into the same premises as maybe-a-’con, maybe-the-manifestation-of-Sentinel’s-paranoia.”, Cetax completed the sentence. He laid a hand on Cloudcutter’s shoulder in what he hoped was a reassuring gesture. “Hey, if anything’s happening, you’ll catch it. You’re not stationed at Cybertron’s most secure prison for nothing.”

Cloudcutter relaxed a little. “Right. Thanks for listening.” He started fiddling with a cable coming out of his right arm. “Just let me plug back into the camera feed, then you should be free to--”

An absolute cacophony descended upon the two robots as the wobbly pile of crates in the corner finally destabilized and crashed down on them.

There was a momentary pause as the they freed themselves from the pile, and the ruckus and noise until they were back on their feet and had gotten the supply crates stacked back up lasted just long enough for them to not notice the clattering of small feet against a crawlspace in the ceiling.


	2. Tinfoiling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was written around the scenario of the 'Cons stealing material on Cybertron to rebuild good old Megs, who's presently chilling bodyless in a prison cell...  
> Where better to get spare body parts than at a very official sciencey place? No one will notice. Definitely not the mech who works on the floor where they store the fuel pumps.

"You WHAT?" Cadenza yelled in horror, "your facility 'lost' someone's FUEL PUMP? How in the name of Vector Sigma do you lose a fuel pump?!"  
The unfortunate yelled-at party, a dingy-looking yellow mech by the name of Hodgepodge, reassuringly lifted his hands and hissed a series of frantic "Shh-shh-shh"-s. Spark racing, Cadenza collected herself. This was supposed to be a relaxing evening at this just mildly legal bar, after all, with absolutely no obvious under-the-table trading of spare parts going on. Not that anyone knew that Cadenza had illegally modified her armour and weapons for eons, of course.  
Hodgepodge, who worked at a shell recycling facility, was an acquaintance of hers and his goodwill towards her occasionally resulted in him handing over a few low-level upgrades extracted from discarded shells. Not extremely valuable ones, of course - complicated parts like old hands, eyes, or fuel pumps were securely stored for the medics to use. It just so happened that one of those fuel pumps had gone missing a day ago - despite them being stored in a guarded container in a high security building.

“Troopers are looking into it”, Hodgepodge explained. “The whole place is on lockdown.” He pulled a face. “We could’ve sold that one for a good sum to some medic - gigantic thing, you should’ve seen it. High efficiency and fully functional to boot.”

Cadenza stared into her drink. “Okay, but who on Cybertron just hauls a whole spare part out of a guarded building in the middle of Iacon? If anything’s wrong, there’s the clinics you can go to, the street medics...how’d someone even get past the cameras?”

Hodgepodge shrugged. “All my colleagues have their little pet theories, you know. From ‘it’s an inside job’ to ‘the ‘cons got in’ to ‘there’s a thief who transforms into security monitors and that’s why no one caught it.’ Honestly - I think it’s just the troopers running low on energy, with the way Sentinel’s ordering them to be everywhere at the same time thrice. Probably slipped into standby in the evening, some of them. Someone could’ve snuck in for whatever reason.” His expression took a turn towards the uncomfortable.

“Probably”, Cadenza agreed, nodding solemnly, before gasping loudly at him, tightening her grip on the glass. “Wait, what’s that about ‘cons?”  
“Just a theory,” Hodgepodge mumbled, “no one in the facility actually has an idea, but - Sentinel’s focus is on the entirely wrong things, so some bots have picked up rumours of massive holes in security. Scaremongering about secret invasions and double agents and nonsense like that.” He took a few big gulps of his drink an continued, “There’s a whole betting pool going on, a floor below my workshop. On who might be a spy, or when Megatron’s gonna get broken out of that cushy cell of his.”  
“Oh, so you know what happened at Trypticon the other day?”

Hodgepodge made a noncommittal strained noise. “Rumours. News got nuffin’, but I got an anonymous account off the grid this morning. Nothing concrete, but a whole pile of hysteria. Scary stuff.”  
Cadenza snorted. “‘Course Sentinel’s gonna pretend nothing’s happened. The bot’s too far up his own aft to let the people know anything.”  
“Oh, yeah.” Hodgepodge lowered his voice to a whisper. “And too busy keeping Ultra Magnus’ comatose body cold, probably.”  
“There’s so much to worry about,” Cadenza mused, starting back into her drink as if to look for answers. “They could be in. The ‘cons, I mean. Could be working on getting Megatron back out while we sit here.”  
Hodgepodge’s armour rattled loudly as he shuddered and sank into his chair. “Oh, no, nope. I hope not. I really, really hope that’s not what’s going on.”

“And what if it happens?” Cadenza shot him a wild-eyed look. “What if whatever they’re doing succeeds? And what are all of us going to do? And Sentinel’s forces have their servos full keeping the Autobots in line - ” “Someone’s gonna make him call in the offplanet Elite Guard teams”, Hodgepodge interjected, “or - at least that’s what they should do.”  
“And he’s not gonna listen,” Cadenza continued, “so whatever’s happening with the Trypticon incident and vanishing parts no one should need is just gonna keep going…”  
“Idunwannathinkaboutit”, Hodgepodge said painedly and dropped his head on the table surface with a loud CLANG while his drinking partner went on, unphased.  
"They could try to build some nefarious breaky-inny thing, some sort of supersonic destructocannon - hell, they could try to get Lord Buckethead in there a new body so he can break out! Destroy - " Cadenza froze and squinted at the air. "Wait, what if. What - Hodgepodge, what if they're getting up to that."

“Oh, of course”, Hodgepodge groaned. Divorcing his face from the sweet, cold refuge that was the table’s surface, he reached over to Cadenza’s half-full pint of high grade and emptied it in one go. “Please. Sure. The Lord of all Decepticons, swooping in right as the whole planet’s holed in without any real chance of hitting back. Do you mind keeping your doom prophecies at bay? Please?”

Cadenza stared at the empty glass. Then at Hodgepodge. And then back at the glass again before taking a few seconds to think it over and shooting him a beaming grin. “Alright, alright. Let’s not panic here, buddy.”  
Hodgepodge sighed in relief. “And promise to lend me one of your souped-up laser rifles, just in case.”  
“Sure thing!” Cadenza reached over the table heartily slap him on the back before pointing at the pint glass, the contents of which he’d so rudely robbed her of. “You buy me another one of those, though.”  
“No doomsaying”, Hodgepodge warned. Cadenza dramatically laid a hand over her spark. “No doomsday-anything!”, she agreed.


End file.
